frey

because the old one was a little broken:

Longer, better documentation footage for Sounds like Light, Lights like Sound:

Watch the video in ogg theora format, 320×240 or look at the icky closed source YouTube flash version below:

The YouTube version is a little broken at the end. I don’t know why, but since I seem to have broken my ffmpeg encoder’s mp3 support it will be a week or two before it’s fixed. Fixed!

My Wiring board blew up again – this time I think it was the actual CPU I fried, rather than the FTDI USB-Serial chip, which was the culprit last time. In any case I’ve had to hack together a replacement system using Arduino boards instead. 5x RGB controllable modules makes for 15 output pins, which was easily doable on the Wiring board, but is just outside of the range of the Arduino’s 12 pins.

What’s more, the power and data distribution thing I built to handle all of the wiring for this thing is connected to the controller board (orginally Wiring) by 2x 8-core ribbon cables (you can see them in the picture below, each snaking off the distribution board on the left to go to the two separate Arduino boards in the middle/right). So think about it for a second: 15 doesn’t divide into 8 very nicely, nor does 3 divide into 8 very nicely.

So one of the lighting boards is shared across two ribbon cables, which was fine when it was all on the one I/O board, but now that I’ve got two of them it’s meant a doubling up of data transmission for the third light module. To save bandwidth in the original design (making serial communication speedier) I transmit light control information in packets of 3 bytes (red, green, blue). Because the third light module is split over two Arduino boards (red and green pins on board 0, blue pin on board 1) I have to transmit the third light module’s data to both board 0 (as module 2) and to board 1 (as module 0).

Look, it makes sense to me, OK? :-)

But I’ve got it to work again, for the first time since I left New Zealand! Hooray.

is up on DailyMotion

and YouTube

edited to come, I do promise.. eventually.

Well, Sounds Like Light is now finished, quite well and truly. It won the Best Visual Arts award for Fringe 07, which is such an amazing honour for me. Thanks Fringe.

The installation was a resounding success. Everyone either loved it, or they thought it was weird, which I take as a compliment. The scheme I had of reviewing and upgrading the code each evening based on audience reactions really worked a treat, it was like several days of user testing, although it did mean that people who arrived early didn’t get as good a show as people who arrived a bit later.

Being part of the Fringe festival was awesome as well. Fringe gave me something larger than myself to plan towards – an organized framework that placed me and my art in a broader ‘art’ context, which meant that as a first-time visual-arts exhibitor I felt like I wasn’t on my own in any way, that what I was doing had meaning outside of itself, and that even if my show hadn’t worked, the fact that it was part of a festival would have given it significance anyway.

Fringe for me was like a platform for doing something awesome — something that I probably wouldn’t’ve done had there not been this larger context in which to set it. I recommend to anyone else thinking of putting on something for the Fringe — do it, do it, do it.

Video footage is to follow. It needs to be edited and gained and colour-corrected and things like that, as video cameras don’t seem to like darkness very much — funny that.

initial RGB tests with PWM – on the final there are four LED’s per colour, rather than just two as shown here.

I do very much like the colour mixing that happens as a result of all of the beams of light being out of alignment and inconsistent..

Hey everyone,

Sorry about the total lack of updates. I have been going completely nuts making Sounds Like Light, Lights Like Sound go. It’s all working now.

Details are as follows:

tracking:
- infrared security camera
- high-powered LED-based infrared emitter
- custom tracking code based on OpenCV. I hope to release the source code to this a bit later on.

sound:
- puredata based system, with a number of ’scenes’ that it moves through.

light:
- 5 custom-made RGB-controllable light boards, each with 4 x red 30000 mcd, 4 x green 30000 mcd, and 4x blue 10000 mcd ultra-bright LEDs. I can set each board individually to a 24-bit RGB colour, with an optional crossfade setting with various speeds, as well as a speed-adjustable strobe, again individually assignable for each board.
- pc interface via a Wiring board

Running at the moment are an intro sequence which totally blacks out the room once you properly enter, followed by a tone generator sensitive to observer position via polar coordinates (r=volume, theta=tone), then a single-grain granular synthesis engine again sensitive to observer position via polar coordinates (r=sample width, theta=sample start point) with some music as samples, and an exit sequence.

People seem to love it. I’ve had some groups of kids through, and they go completely nuts. I had some artists tell me they thought it was beautiful.

It’s been something of a learning exercise opening the space like this up to the public, and as a result I’m constantly tweaking the code based on what people do. While I had hoped people would pick up on the fact that what they’re doing modulates the sound and light, it seems that it is a little too subtle — or more likely, I’m significantly more attuned to it since I’m the one who built the thing. So I’ve taken to telling people that their movement directly controls it, which seems to lead to a richer experience on the part of the audience. It’s the old audience vs creator/performer/artist divide again: how does an artist know that what they are trying to say is what the audience actually hears?

A consistent issue has been pacing and control. I’m trying to steer clear of having a brute-force timer that just cuts out after a certain time period, as this is likely to lead to an unnatural break in the experience. However experiments with setting up an audience-triggered exit mechanism more often than not leads to people walking out before the full thing is played through.

There’s a steep staircase you have to climb down to enter the space, and I’m using stepping-off-the-bottom-of-the-staircase as a ‘begin’ trigger to black out the room from the ‘intro’ scene and start off the system proper, so perhaps I could use stepping back on the staircase as a ’shutdown’ or ‘next scene’ trigger. I like the idea of ‘next scene’ being the exit — you think you’ve seen all there is to see, and so you go to leave, and then it changes, and suddenly leaving doesn’t look quite so attractive any more…

Anyway, if you’re around town, please do come and check it out.

Sounds Like Light, Lights Like Sound
February 23, 24, 25, 28, & March 1, 2, 3
10am – 7pm
at The Fridge, next to Happy,
corner Tory and Vivian St
Wellington

shines nicely on the ceiling, too:

heaps of light :-)

Hey everyone, thanks for the suggestions and do keep them coming in. I shall be borrowing the field recorder (AKG condensor mic goodness with 24bit/96kHz recording for delicious downsampling) from Victoria University and running around recording some of these sometime next week. Look out for a dude with some microphones :-)

The space that Sounds Like Light, Lights Like Sound is going into used to be the keg room, way back when the Latinos/Club Garibaldi/Happy building used to be a three-storey pub called the Sticky Wicket. So it’s a little bit gross:

But I like it that way. Most of the junk is going to stay in, as it will provide interesting shapes for the lighting to silhouette…